Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  “Back a bit. Hold it. I’ll cut better chocks for the wheels to-morrow.”

  “Do you mind if I work the saw? You’re not insured, you see, and as your employer I’m liable. Workmen’s Compensation Acts.”

  At this moment a policeman appeared with his bicycle. A grim, blank look settled on Bert Close’s face.

  “Good afternoon,” Phillip called out. “Nice weather.”

  “I was looking at your tractor. Don’t think I’ve seen one like that before.”

  “Lovely little job, isn’t it? All British. Product of the brain of Mr. Harry Ferguson, an Ulsterman.”

  “It’s so quiet.”

  “Very economical. You’ll see a lot of these about after the war. Think the weather is settled fine?”

  “I think so. Lot of corn was laid over the week-end.”

  “Yes. Land’s too strong, after the first ploughing of the sheep-fed grass. It will be better next year.”

  “You’re right. Well, I mustn’t stop the good work. Good day.”

  “Good day.”

  “Nosey Parker,” sneered Bert Close, as the policeman bicycled away.

  Now for the great moment. Phillip opened the throttle. The saw spun at a thousand revolutions a minute. Bert Close held one end of a pole. With a stick Phillip pushed forward the end resting on the iron bench to the spinning edge of the saw. Sawdust spurted, steel rang. Each log as it was being cut was held by his right hand and put on the tail-board of the lorry. Poppy began to stack them neatly in rows. Phillip could see that Bert thought his way of pushing with a stick was over-careful, but he said nothing. It was a way evolved in sawing thick, irregular thorn-trunks on the farm, after experience of jamming the saw and causing the balata belt to ‘throw off’ the pulley. He had learned that wood to be sawn must be fed straight to the saw, otherwise it would check the saw, either stopping it or breaking it. If it broke it might fly to pieces and bisect the sawyer’s skull. Bert Close watched intently, moving nearer each time as the heavy pole was shortened.

  When all were sawn they collected picks, shovels, oil-can, hand-saw in silence, and hid them under leaves in the wood. Phillip drove the tractor to its hide and tied canvas cover over it. The belt was taken back lest it rain, with axes, food basket, billy-can. Poppy’s bicycle lifted into the lorry, which was half-full, and now for the Cutty Sark Inn! Phillip thought Bert Close needed a snifter to restore him. Although Bert Close was a muscular, powerful fellow, he was not used to such sustained work. They each had three pints of scrumpy cider. Phillip felt light-headed. On the way back he called at the Post Office for letters. One in Melissa’s handwriting. He put it unopened in his pocket, to read later. By the time they reached the field he felt afraid to open it. She wouldn’t be coming; I don’t want to see her; she’s written to say she’s engaged to someone; I shan’t open the letter.

  While Poppy was getting the supper, Bert Close began to pick up logs.

  “I’ll show you how to stack so they don’t tumble, guv’.”

  They began at the end wall of the underground room. Phillip watched how Bert Close made the corners by selecting the larger, straighter logs to tie-in on the header-stretcher principle of building a brick wall.

  “Tell you what, guv’, we must arrange the work so’s we knock off at five sharp, guv’. Then we’ll have time to tidy up like this every day. What’s up, aren’t you feeling well?”

  “Shoot—my—bundle,” Phillip whispered, staggering outside. Never again scrumpy cider! Having got rid of it, he opened the letter, to take the worst; and came back saying brightly “It pickles the libido, Bert!”

  “Ah, you aren’t used to it, guv’. Feelin’ bett’r?”

  Oh yes, he was indeed feeling better. Melissa was coming at the end of the month.

  That night he lay in warm contentment on a ground-sheet beside a small pine tree, while the white owl floated over the mice-runs in the tall grass, and the faint strains of Danny Boy came from the loft; and then silence.

  Chapter 8

  MELISSA

  The area of woodland they had cleared was now wide open to blue sky and high white clouds. The branches, or shreddings, were all piled in one place. The farmer was pleased with the standards left; apparently Phillip was the only wood-cutter who had kept his promise to leave occasional straight trunks for timber. With the Norwegian saw he trimmed the lower branches of these trees to improve the quality of the bole.

  Bert Close had discovered the ease of working without a shirt. He went about clad only in boots, peaked cap, and tight trousers held up by the broad and brass-buckled belt. His shoulder and arm muscles had been enlarged beyond the normal by constant loading and unloading of his lorry; perhaps the recent lifting of so many old tombstones had whipped the cords of those biceps? But he was weak on his legs, after much prolonged driving.

  The torso of Bert Close was curiously white when first he had taken his shirt off. White became red, then brown; the face had a clearer aspect; a former tendency to a femetic outlook on life was abated, and those dark looks. Wordless harmony replaced tactful silences. Even so, the work called for endurance. Towards noon the heat under the canopies of trees was intense. During the preliminary sweatings there had been moments scarcely bearable. Phillip’s long hours in the hayfield had prepared him for this ‘hard graft’, and Bert Close appeared a little surprised that he could do what he could do, and even outstay him. He told Phillip that the landlord of The Cutty Sark had asked him if the gent really did any work in the woods. Like most men who did little physical work, the landlord’s thoughts about the work of others were based on himself. His own muscles were long interred in beery fat. His words to Bert Close were, “I suppose the gent mucks about with a kid’s chopper, sort of hobby-like?”

  Every day the two men worked until half an hour past noon, when usually Phillip set about making a fire, to boil the water for tea, apart from the others.

  Dearest and Only Melissa,

  I am a Boy Scout again, patrol-leader of the Bloodhounds. I make a fire daily, with one match. The sticks of holly, cobnut, and oak are dry: a few skeleton leaves take the flame, a yellow sun-sly flame licking silently, cat-like, round the shreds of bark. Bert, my fellow axeman, and I have tied a rope between two trees, and slung the lorry cover over the rope, securing corner and side ropes to the bases of other trees. Thus we have a tent that is taut and shower-proof. We lie by it, on the soft dead leaves, beside our fire in the forest, eat our midday food, drink tea out of billy-cans. Every morning Poppy, his girl, gives us each a food-bag, with our initials on it. I don’t want to be told what my bag contains, but to find out when I open it. While I eat I read yesterday’s paper, and Bert Close has what he calls a bit of shut-eye afterwards.

  About 1.15 p.m. I get up, take my axe and start cutting again. Bert will then open an eye; and after an interval, take the carborundum slip, spit on it, and with circular movement of right hand, while holding axe-head in left hand on knee, put an edge on the blade. Usually I throw between two and five poles—depending on the diameters—while he is using the slip. But today I am writing to you.

  A day’s work, the farmer told me, is considered to be 160 poles thrown per axe, allowing about three minutes average for each one. Whether this includes shredding as well, I didn’t ask. The poles we are felling are heavier than the twenty-one-year poles. A few weigh as much as three hundredweight. I consider that we can each throw two hundred a day of the twenty-year stuff without pushing ourselves. Bert Close says he wishes he could spend the rest of the summer in the wood. We are now in proper trim, masters of work. There is a rhythm in our daily task that gives a deep primitive happiness.

  Each day about 3 p.m., after cutting and shredding, Bert Close and I begin to carry the poles one by one to the path. Some are heavy. We stagger with weights up to three hundredweight. A sweltering heat hangs upon the wood. Now longer do we lay the butts so that they plough the path: we select curved bottom poles to act as skids. At 4 p.m. we start to saw, and at 5 p.m.
or a minute or two later, with lorry-body well down on its springs, tools hidden or accounted for, tractor covered, blinders between lips, we set out for the village. But now we go the longer way round, in order to call at The Cutty Sark for our beer, and come back by way of the woods in the valley where the hobby falcon hunts.

  For I avoid Malandine village. There is talk (I’m told by Bert Close) in the pub about commandeering the wood I’ve stored in the Gartenfeste, in the event of fuel shortages, should the supply of coal fail in the coming winter. I suppose it could be regarded as selfish hoarding in war-time? The idea of taking the logs is not so fantastic as might seem, for it’s obvious that my visit to the village has caused resentment among some local people.

  On the second Saturday night after our arrival Poppy overheard, in the darkness, a suggestion from the village butcher, to some youths, to overturn the lorry. I could scarcely believe it, knowing the timid though rancorous spirit of that man, who once almost fawned on me. The lorry was standing by the churchyard wall, under the elms, while Bert Close and I were drinking beer in the Ring of Bells. I’d stayed a minute or two after Bert left, to talk with the landlord, whose friendliness and honesty has been consistent during all the years I’ve known him.

  When I rejoined Bert and Poppy they were standing near the lorry. Both were unusually quiet. Poppy had told Bert Close what she had overheard, that the lorry should be overturned and set on fire. Bert had the sense to know that any trouble would cause greater trouble, so he had said and done nothing; but with jacket button’d up and cap set firmly on head, was waiting to go to the rescue should I be set upon as I came down past the butcher’s open door whence the silly suggestion had come.

  Later, I learned the cause of this incident. It was connected with a certain pamphlet sent by me through the post, before the war, to the butcher. The pamphlet was a reprint of a middle-page article in The Daily Crusader written in 1928—an account of the battle of the Somme and the tragedy of two great European cousin-nations destroying each other.

  Now, by the second half of 1940, this had been taken to be propaganda for Germany; and coupled with the name of Gartenfeste, the rumour had gone the rounds, among village men who had not fought in the Great War, that I was an agent of Hitler, and the Gartenfeste had been built as a strong-point for German paratroopers.

  The village butcher to whom I had sent the reprint of the article had, as a young man, a year or two older than myself, not served in the 1914–18 war. But now, in valiant middle-age, making up for a deficiency of courage, he is a fully uniformed member of the Home Guard, with an all-wood rifle; and more than that, he is a scrumpy patriot, for one evening, while I was drinking my glass of ale, I heard, coming from a dark corner of the low-beamed inn (as from a cider-barrel in ferment) a sepulchral voice uttering a warning, or exhortation, that I had heard before. England expects that ’ivry man this day shall dew ’es dooty. Gazing in the direction of the dark corner, I received a look from the Bold Butcher that can only be described as scrumpy!

  Scrumpy is the local name for the sharp, acid cider that pickles anything from little onions to the libido. Its other name is tanglilegs. Legs or no legs, the gas had rumbled its way out of the old hogshead into the barreline body of Bold Butch of Malandine.

  Now I must end. Bert is working alone! With love, from Phillip.

  There was another reason for wanting to avoid Malandine. It was the haunt, on leave, of a village acquaintance with whom Phillip had more or less lost touch since before the war. And at the time of Dunkirk George Pole-Cripps had cut him dead.

  Phillip knew that George Pole-Cripps lived an imaginative life on a level above that of his factual life. Thus, soon after those critical days for the British Expeditionary Force on the beaches of Dunkirk, he appeared in the Ring of Bells limping. His progress to the bar was aided by a walking stick, while his wife’s arm supported the other flank. The inference, strengthened by a look of desperation on his face, was that he had recently come from the hell of Goering’s blitzkrieg upon the sandhills of Dunkirk.

  One morning, when Phillip had gone in, George was showing his walking stick to a visitor. It was fitted with a silver band engraved with words indicating that the stick was A presentation from his men, led to safety through many dangers, by our gallant Company Commander Capt. Pole-Cripps. Phillip had got up from a bench when George and his wife had come in; but was ignored. Did he know too much? For George was a bit of a skrimshanker and wangler. Phillip remembered that George had once told him that he had managed to get, after being demobbed in 1919, a hundred per cent. disability army pension for ‘rheumatism’, the symptoms of which, he said, were undiscoverable by a medical board. Before every annual board he went on a binge in order to display marks of suffering on his face. After some years he managed to commute his pension to a capital sum of two thousand pounds. So successful was this commutation that by the outbreak of the second war in 1939 George apparently had been totally fit when he went to the War Office to be commissioned, in what, in the first war, had been a non-combatant branch of the Army. And so to the Maginot Line of his imagination, and a return to the village with symptoms of an ordeal at Dunkirk—suitably recognised by the walking stick, and its silver band.

  When, later, he met Mrs. Pole-Cripps in the village, he asked why George had avoided him.

  “Well,” she said, in her soft voice, “you see, it is rather difficult for Georgie to be seen talking to you in public, isn’t it? After all, he had just come back from Belgium, where many of his men were shot in the back by fifth-columnists. And forgive my saying it, but it is well-known where your sympathies lie, you know.”

  Poor Georgie Make-Belief! In due course it came out that he had remained in England before, during, and after the 1940 blitzkrieg in France and the Low Countries. Indeed, he served throughout the war in England, as a lieutenant.

  *

  The first week of August was one of torrid heat. All their energies were expended by knocking-off time. They shared a mutual weariness. One afternoon on their return to the Gartenfeste, Phillip noticed Poppy’s garbage pail beside the woodshed clustered with blowflies. The contents were crawling with maggots. The sight set-off frustrated thought of maggots on Lucy’s dead hens lying unburied on the Home Hills. Thus as blowflies to the sheep, and eggs laid on the anus, soon to be bloody, and eaten away. He felt returning upon himself the mental twist about the farm’s dirt and untidiness—thence to the dead in the North African desert—trash heaps and creosote-sewage dumps spread on the glebe field of the village—maggoty rats’ corpses in the stockman’s yards—Lucy’s complaisance with things as they were—decadent England’s untidiness—mental trash spread on the mass-spirit leading directly to the ultimate blast of the untidying bomb.

  “O my God, I can’t stand any more of this life!” he cried aloud.

  He had no idea that anyone would overhear him shouting at himself, while with his hand he scoured the garbage pail, wincing away the maggots, wincing away from the Bad Lands. It was with shame, therefore, that he heard a voice saying, “Hullo. Can I be of help?”, and Melissa was walking towards him, with a younger, darker girl.

  “I was ranting at myself, for not having scoured out this pail. These maggots may get on someone’s sheep.”

  His hand was greasy with garbage, and when she made to take it he pretended not to see. Having washed with carbolic soap, he felt better. Melissa said, “This is cousin Sarah.”

  “How d’you do.”

  The girl had a heavy-looking face, dark reddish complexion, thick lips. Phillip could feel her disapproval of his neurotic words. Why had Melissa brought her? He felt diminished to the point of nullity when she said, as though casually, that she was sailing in twelve days’ time for the Far East; and replied, “You’ll miss the bombing of London, at any rate.”

  “I’ll miss more than that.”

  “My two work-mates with me want to go to the pictures at Queensbridge tonight, would you both like to come?” The rather silent gi
rl, the cousin, said to his relief that she had some work to do.

  An oval face under Donatello curl-clusters embracing a clear, a noble brow. Eyes of that blue called China, large and at times melting when regarding small children, as though she were seeing in them her own to be, one day. We were ‘clear’ again; and going to the pictures at Queensbridge.

  Bert Close and Poppy sat in the cab, Melissa and I stood up behind the lorry body which I had swept out. It was a warm sunny evening, and with wind rushing upon our faces we looked over the hedges of the road we travelled. How much more beautiful the countryside was now, with its squares and rectangles of corn—instead of the dull thistly green of all the years I have known it—all but two of them years of agricultural depression. Turning round, with my back to the cab, as we went down a valley, I looked at the fields of roots and grass, of corn beginning to ripen on the slopes facing south. The previous year the field adjoining mine had yielded eighteen sacks of wheat to the acre; it is in wheat again this season, and looking to be an even heavier crop.

  Now we were going up a hill, the grey road moving back behind us. We topped the rise, and saw the broad runway of an airfield, with white aircraft of Coastal Command dispersed around what was once a heathery down rough-grazed by South Devon bullocks. I wished I were farming in this country—land of vast views and distant blue tors, soil which could be ploughed at any time and always give the farmer a seedbed. The difference in price was an indication of the difference in yield: five pounds an acre for light land in East Anglia, fifty pounds in the West Country, pre-war values. Yet there is a quality in the austere East Anglian landscape that I should miss if ever I came back to live in these salt airs above the Channel. But with Melissa beside me, all places are one.

  Walking to the movie-house, Bert Close said, “In a week’s time we’ll be back there, guv.”